Your Game is not Done

Is your game completely ready to go, and be published?

Congratulations!

You've reached the half-way mark!

After that, there's another half-way mark, when you thought you were done.

How many revisions has your game gone through?

By a revision, I mean changes to the game, the re-creation or alteration of game components, and then a playtest.

When you think your game is publishable, that's when you're a quarter of the way there.

Do more polishing

As I get better at board game design, I'm doing more and more polishing. I'm doing something like 100 revisions of polishing to a game that's already complete.

Does your game need 100 extra revisions? Probably not, but wouldn't it be significantly better because of them?

Every time I've thought "okay, I can't work on this game forever... it needs to go out, so I can work on something else," I've been wrong.

By weight

In my experience, games take the following number of revisions:

• Light: 50
• Medium-light: 100-150
• Medium: 200

Radlands would've been better if I'd done about 25 more revisions.

A game will never be perfect. Radlands wasn't, but it was closer than most other games. It will always be the case that if you did one more revision, you'd find some little thing to improve.

Even though you may aim for perfection, and should do so, you will never reach it. My games never feel complete. I always feel like they could use more work.

"A work of art is never finished, only abandoned"

— Leonardo da Vinci

At the end of every game design, there should be an extended period of "polishing". This is where you analyse and fine-tune the small-scale components of your game.

Pore over every number, every card, and every other little thing in the game.

Every card or action in your game should have had hours of thought put into it, and it should be the one that survived when you culled so many others.

Fix or remove everything that's kludgy, inconsistent, a bit weird, counterintuitive to players, complex, hard to explain, or not super-enjoyable.

A game is not done until you've fixed every single problem — even the ones that you thought were just inherent in your choice of game style.

Your job is not to find excuses. It's your job to get rid of these things, and find simpler, nicer ways of doing them.

I want the game to be a breeze to play, and be childishly simple. I want everything to be exciting, bursting with theme, strategically interesting, and fair.

Keep working on it, until you give me what I want. As a player of your game, I have no time for your excuses. I want all good stuff, and no bad stuff. I want everything, and I don't care why you've failed to give it to me.

With a properly-polished game, I find that playtesters are apologetic that they can't provide any negative feedback at all.

When one of my games is complete, everyone likes it, and some people love it. Playtesters are saying "I'd buy this", unprompted.

Your game must be the absolute best you can make it. You cannot decide that it's good enough and that you need to get on with the next project. Remember that even if you do your absolute best work, it's probably still not going to be good enough. Doing any less will yield certain failure.

Is it worth it?

Why do I put such finely-detailed work into my games? Couldn't I make twice as many games, instead of spending so much time adding a small amount of quality to my existing games?

The success of a game does not scale linearly with the quality of the game.

When people buy games, they do not buy an even mix of good and bad games. They mostly just buy the best games. This means that a small number of excellent games account for most of the games sold. As your game approaches the quality of that elite group, its success skyrockets.

A game with a "quality" of six out of ten might sell 2,000 copies.

A 7/10 game might sell 20,000 copies.

An 8/10 game might sell 200,000 copies. You get the idea.

This means that every tiny improvement you make to your already-good game will increase its number of copies sold drastically. Making your 7/10 game into a 7.2/10 game might make it sell twice as many copies.

As game quality increases, success increases exponentially.

Because of this exponential success curve, I expect that one of my published games will make more money than all the others put together.

I'm not trying to make lots of reasonable games. I'm trying to make one game that's a huge hit. Doing this is worth my time, and it's worth yours too.

Some people are prepared to do this level of polishing. You're competing with them.

Timeline of my gangster game

My gangster game went through five revisions. After that, the game worked, and I was happy with it.

After ten revisions, the game was publishable. I kept working on the game, however. It was worth putting time into.

At about revision twenty, I declared that the game was basically finished, and a few more revisions would be needed. The game was fun, and a few rough corners just needed to be polished.

At revision thirty-five, I declared the game complete. I proposed it to a few publishers, but didn't get any interest. I played the game a bit in the meantime, and kept doing revisions, just for my own amusement. My board game pals would pull the game off my shelf, and want to play it. After every game, I learned something, and made more changes to the game, even though it was good.

At revision fifty-two, a publisher expressed serious interest in the game. They really liked it, but… they wanted to hold the game for a year, before publishing it.

I went to another publisher. They put the game in front of blind playtest groups. They wanted more options on a player's turn. This was a big change, but I made it.

We went through the same process numerous times. Each time, I made the game better and better. The problems they had with the game were real, and significant. All the time I was fixing problems, I also added new stuff to the game. I just sat there, looking at elements of the game that were working well, and thinking "could I make this even better?" It was the kind of exercise no busy person would ever contemplate... just musing over the game's components.

Eventually, the publisher requested a problem be fixed, but when I fixed the problem, the publisher didn't accept that it had been fixed. I checked with many other players, to see if the problem still existed. It simply didn't. There was no way forward with this publisher.

I went back to the original publisher, as a year had elapsed. They were still very interested. After 81 revisions, the game is now in the final stages of approval for publication. It's so much better than when I first sent it to them. All the delays simply forced me to keep working on the game, long past the point where I thought it was finished. I made fairly significant changes through this period. It wasn't just tweaks. Maybe I should've just kept working on it forever.

And... the game was rejected by that publisher. In the year of working with the new publisher, I'd added all kinds of cool stuff to the game, and it had become too complex to appeal to everyone.

Back to work!

The game has now been through 120 revisions, and is ready to go, again. It's simpler, and far better in every way.

Update: did some reworking of the game. It's now in revision 251. It's really good, now. I'm glad I didn't stop at 120.

Update: Glad I didn't stop at 251. Revision 287 is so much better.

100 revisions, for a medium-light game, is now my minimum. If I finish the game before then, I'm just fooling myself, and I'll keep working on the game until it's actually finished.

Another good example is my pirate game. I put 41 revisions into it. It had a great core, and my friends all liked it. I tried (unsuccessfully) to get it published for a while, but eventually went off and did other things. Friends would often mention my old pirate game. So, ten years later (in 2025), I decided to get it out again and polish it up a bit, ready for another try at publication. I was a vastly better designer, with more resources and experience than I'd had previously. The game that I thought was publishable at revision 41 ended up needing over two hundred more revisions, to become publishable. The 41-revision person is probably you, right now. The 250+ revision person is you in the future, when you're a much better game designer.

You're free to skimp on the revisions, if you like. Just remember that your competition are not.

How many revisions has your game been through?

Go back and look at the game at its half-way point. It should like basically the same game as it does now.

Ending development

At the end of development, you're not fixing problems — you're making things better. You're just going over absolutely everything, until it's perfect.

At the end of Radlands' design, I was very happy with everything in the game. New and experienced players all liked the game, and struggled to find anything negative to say about it. That was good evidence that the game really was done.

There will come a time when you play the game several times, without wanting to change anything. That's when you know the game is done.

Resting

...and that's when your game isn't done at all.

At the end of design comes what I call the "resting" phase. This is where I'm not setting out to do anything, and there are no problems that need to be fixed. I just play the game for a month or two. During this time, I'll definitely see things I could improve. I don't know what these things are in advance, but the resting phase allows me to see them. Just a few card tweaks here and there are enough to make this phase worthwhile.

The development of both my published games ended with a very frustrating phase. The game would just keep getting better, and was never done. I just let this process go on for as long as it wanted, and eventually, it ended.

This polishing phase adds a good chunk of quality to your game. Don't be afraid to go back and make larger changes, if your polishing uncovers larger flaws. My polishing goes backwards and forwards many times before concluding.

Finish your game!

I've made the mistake of submitting unfinished or lacklustre games to publishers. They fix the game their own way, or more often, just reject it, after being initially interested. Roxley deployed their in-house developer, and we worked together to make Radlands significantly better.

Working on a game after it's been accepted for publication brings a world of problems. The publisher now has to approve everything you do. I'm not going to do that any more. These days, I just finish the game myself, and hand it to the publisher. Then, they can do as much fine polishing work as they like, with minimal input from me.